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How would you like to have a unique 3-tiered marketing strategy that is easy to optimise, and can provide you with the relevant leads you need for your business? There are many types of strategies in the market. The question however is how do you know which is the right one for your business.
We as Digital Marketers are facing an ever-changing environment when it comes to consumer buying. Oftentimes, this is due to seasonal trends that alter from year to year. This year, the effects of COVID-19 have definitely played a part in slowing down businesses. What I would like to talk about across my series of articles, Keeping Relevant in the Digital Age, are the strategies and tools that will help keep you and your business relevant in marketing during times like this.
In my series of articles, I will first address the importance of having the right strategies when it comes to structuring advertisements on Facebook, Google, and Instagram. I will then touch upon the importance of in-house content generation also known as higher education content as a form of marketing, and how it will help with your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Finally, I will discuss the 2020 Marketing Trends that you will want to keep a lookout for.
Let’s first deep-dive on how to create a structure for your digital marketing campaigns. To have a good marketing strategy, you need to have a funneling process. This funneling process is key to attract, engage and retain your leads or customers. I often see companies launching campaigns with stand-alone ads that may succeed in bringing in leads, but those leads often turn out to be irrelevant. The result of these leads are often a misrepresentation of their intent with your product, or simply an impulse decision to fill their details in without giving much thought. If this is the case, then as marketers, it becomes very difficult to figure out what is wrong with your ads and how to troubleshoot them.
However, if these companies utilised a 3-tiered funnel strategy where each tier brings its own value to the audience, they may have succeeded in educating and engaging their audience better, and receive better quality leads.
The first tier of the funnel strategy is typically the ‘brand awareness tier’. The goal of this initial tier would be to attract as many people as possible to eventually convert into leads for the marketing team to re-engage, and the sales team to follow up on. In tier 1, it is important to recognise what value your company is providing to the audience. With that value in mind, you then market to the masses, keeping your targeted audience as general as possible. Here at TaF.tc, we often set our first tier to market to a pool of at least 1.5 to 2 million people in Singapore.
If you are using Facebook as your marketing channel, I would recommend starting tier 1 off with 3 different campaign objectives; a lead generation ad, a traffic ad to your company's main website, and a traffic ad to your company’s blogging site. All of these campaigns are set to improve your brand awareness to the public.
Now within the first tier, you will get two kinds of responses. The first will be people who are genuinely interested, and will leave their details or convert into customers right away. Your second group will include people who have put their details down, but have yet to convert (for whatever reason). This would be where your tier 2 campaigns come into place.
Your tier 2 campaigns are re-marketing lead gen campaigns set to target audiences who have already interacted with your ads in tier 1 - either by viewing/clicking into them, or having filled up their details in a lead form. The value that you are now selling to people in your tier 2 lead gen ads have to be more specific compared to your tier 1 ads where your goal was to attract a large audience. For TaF.tc, these are the ads in which we may now elaborate on how our programmes may benefit our consumers, and may include course objectives, trainer descriptions, and related school support. With that said, in your tier 2 lead gen ads, expect to receive a smaller pool of leads for your sales team to follow up on but ultimately, leads that are far more targeted and relevant in their interest with your product.
What is special about lead gen ads is that by capturing audience details in a lead form, the marketing team can then send them relevant content in a follow-up email to educate them further about the programme. You can achieve this is by having a great CRM with marketing automation in it. We will discuss more on these marketing tools in the upcoming series.
Tier 3 is all about retargeting the audience who did not offer their details in Tier 1 and 2. This will be your final shout-out to the public on why they should leave their details with you or why they should convert into customers of your product. For many online retail buyers, you will notice that if you leave an e-commerce site after putting items into your cart but not clicking on the ‘checkout’ button, you will receive an email chaser about the items, or see ads when browsing on Facebook showing huge discounts on the items. This is their final call to you to make the conversion.
These are the 3 tiers of marketing, which if applied properly, you will gain the upper hand in your marketing compared to those without a detailed thought process. Again, to reiterate, the goal of these 3 tiers is to attract, engage, and retain new and revisiting audiences who ultimately can convert into customers of your product. We are attracting people in tier 1; re-engaging our audience in tier 2 and tier 3, as well as via follow-up by the sales team. Finally, we are retaining our captured leads and audience as they funnel into our marketing campaign automated workflows using our CRM and marketing automation tools. Here, they will continue to receive our EDMs, newsletter, and more.
This strategy is a very brief skeleton that can be adjusted and catered to your business needs. I hope it was educational for you, and if you have ideas or other marketing strategies, we would love to hear them. Do comment in our social media threads and we would love to start a discussion. Keep a lookout for our other marketing articles in the next few weeks as this is just the first of the series! For more information about marketing, TaF.tc offers some great courses on digital marketing and inbound marketing.
